Patterson: Seahawks buck odds, return to postseason fray

SEATTLE — Go ahead and block out the first weekend of January, folks. It may not be official just yet, but the Seattle Seahawks are going to the playoffs.

While Monday night’s 21-7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings at CenturyLink Field may not have been the most scintillating performance cobbled together by the Seahawks this season, it should be enough for Seattle to book its ticket to the postseason.

In a season where the national pundits were predicting disaster before the season began, where the odds were stacked against Seattle when it found itself 4-5 and staring down a menacing gauntlet of games, the Seahawks are now all but in the playoffs with three games still remaining in the season. I find myself shaking my head in amazement while typing those words, but that’s the reality.

Monday’s game was a showdown between two teams looking to secure their credentials as postseason teams. The victory, Seattle’s fourth straight, improved Seattle to 8-5 and kept the Seahawks in the NFC’s first wild-card position. It dropped Minnesota, currently the NFC’s second wild-card team, to 6-6-1, and the rest of the chasing pack is at 6-7. So with three games remaining Seattle can still theoretically be caught.

But Seattle is effectively three games in front of the three teams currently on the outside looking in at 6-7. The Seahawks own the tiebreaker over Carolina based on their head-to-head victory two weeks earlier. Seattle also has the tiebreaker on Washington and Philadelphia based on conference record.

Meanwhile, the trends all favor Seattle, too. Not only are the Seahawks the hottest team of the bunch, Carolina and Washington are coming apart at the seams, having lost five and four straight, respectively, while Minnesota and Philadelphia are also losing ground.

Throw in Seattle’s relatively easy remaining schedule — the Seahawks have a tough home game against Kansas City in two weeks, but also have games against San Francisco and Arizona, which are both 3-10 — and it’s safe to start browsing for plane tickets to either Chicago or Dallas.

That’s a far cry from where the Seahawks found themselves just a month earlier. Heading into Week 11 the analytics website FiveThirtyEight.com had Seattle’s playoff odds pegged at 29 percent. But coming into this week the Seahawks were bumped up to 88 percent. Sunday’s results went Seattle’s way, and after Monday’s victory the Seahawks’ odds were increased to more than 99 percent.

That’s as close to clinching a playoff spot as a team can come without actually doing it.

“I don’t feel there’s been anything accomplished yet,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said after Monday’s game. “I’m happy we’re playing good ball, we know how we want to do it, we’re in the mentality we’ve been in other years when we really finished well and did a lot of damage. It’s available to us, it’s there now, and I’m really excited about that. But talk to me after we’ve accomplished something, we haven’t done anything yet.”

That’s the way a coach has to talk, but it’s just not true. What Seattle has accomplished this season is tremendous, particularly following an offseason that saw a mass exodus of big names who played central roles in the Seahawks’ glory days from 2012-16. The coaching staff deserves a ton of credit for maneuvering an unheralded team into its current position.

Monday’s game even felt like a vintage Seattle performance. These new Seahawks have generally won games with their offense, with the focus of the team switching from a star-studded defense to quarterback Russell Wilson. But this victory was all about a defense that took away Minnesota’s best offensive weapons, stopped the Vikings twice on fourth-and-1 in scoring position, and scored a defensive touchdown. Seattle showed it can win even when Wilson (a career-low 72 yards) has his worst passing day of the season.

“If you want to be a championship team you have to find ways to win even when it doesn’t look pretty,” Wilson said. “We’ve had a lot of great games, we’ve had some tough ones and found ways to get through it. Tonight we stayed the course, we kept battling and I thought (it) was going to be a crazy game anyway in a different way, but sure enough we were able to get a huge win.”

Seattle’s going to have to pack its suitcase for the playoffs. The Los Angeles Rams have already clinched the NFC West, meaning the Seahawks have to settle for a wild-card spot. That means a road game in the first round of the playoffs, and if Seattle survives that, another road game in the divisional round. The only way the Seahawks would get a home playoff game would be to face a lower-seeded wild-card team for the NFC title.

But the reason why we can speculate about this is because Seattle knows in both its heart and mind that it’s heading to the postseason, and given the circumstances that’s a remarkable accomplishment.

Follow Nick Patterson on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.